Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Science fiction movie written entirely by a computer

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 06-10-2016, 12:52 AM:

Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. It's about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks -- it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.

Article

Movie

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 06-10-2016, 06:18 AM:

The movie sounded like gibberish to me. Any appearance of being a coherent story can be attributed, purely, to apophenia. (The psychological phenomenon that lets us see constellations in a random field of stars or the shapes of animals in the clouds.)

I suppose it is an interesting exercise in making a computer compose a script but I think the algorithm/program used to accomplish that task needs work. It seems to me that the computer was spitting out random sentences.

Yeah, I get it. This is supposed to be an exercise in humor. In a way, it is sort of funny, like the way playing Mad Libs is funny, but the article did say that they wanted to see if a computer could write a movie script that could win (be recognized) in a competition. Honestly, once the novelty wears off, I don't think that the script is coherent enough to be recognized as anything more than a curiosity.

We've all seen other programs that can write music, poetry and even speeches that are much more coherent and understandable than that. When I first read the article, I was curious and had expectations that this script would be like those other things. This script (and the program that created it) is rudimentary by those standards.

Whoever wrote that program needs to go back to the drawing board. They've got a lot more work to do.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 06-10-2016, 11:10 AM:

quote: Randy Stankey
The movie sounded like gibberish to me. Any appearance of being a coherent story can be attributed, purely, to apophenia. (The psychological phenomenon that lets us see constellations in a random field of stars or the shapes of animals in the clouds.)

So, it's similar to most of the Marvel movies then.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 06-10-2016, 10:24 PM:

LOL! [Big Grin]

Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 06-15-2016, 06:40 PM:

quote: Frank Cox
The AI named itself Benjamin

P.S. The movie reminded of an old video game that had the bad translation from Japanese to English "All your base are belong to us".

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 06-15-2016, 07:29 PM:

A true classic, indeed: